Intel insists its innocence as it responds to antitrust allegations from the European Union

Intel revels in the glory of being the CPU industry leader, at least for the time being. However, like many industry leaders, they have found themselves the primary target of the crosshairs of criticism. Further, as with any company that is dominating the market, allegations of antitrust violations become a serious threat to the company worldwide.

At last Intel issued a response to the European Union and telling the Union to "bring it on." Intel's formal written response to the EU states not only its innocence, but also challenges EU regulators to hold a hearing to evaluate claims that it illegally used rebates to seize sales from AMD.

Despite Intel's feisty tone, Washington based antitrust lawyer David Balto, a former U.S. Federal Trade Commission policy director, stated that Intel faces a nearly impossible challenge in proving its innocence to the EU. He explains, "Intel is going to have a really significant challenge in the proceedings before the EU. The EU is much more sensitive to the long-term competition effects by
dominant firms and much less ready to accept simple snapshots of a
company's conduct."

As per EU regulations Intel may be fined up to 10 percent of its annual sales for antitrust violations. Microsoft initially tried to argue against the EU when it was hit with similar charges and the end result was a painful $690M USD fine. Intel has even more to lose as it is constantly price cutting to stay competitive and has smaller profit margins, which force it to engage in yearly layoffs.

Intel is also under investigation in South Korea and Japan following raids in these nations.

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Being a monopoly alone isn't a problem.Sure, microsoft has the monopoly on WMA files, but WMA is hardly the only choice (or even the best) for music.

I thought Microsoft's monopoly problems were more relate to bundling and varying pricing and availability to discourage PC makers from using competitors (even among windows software).

Anyhow, as AMD is a somewhat major European corporation, it'd be interesting if some element of protectionism plays into the Intel monopoly case. Germany's bailed AMD out before, maybe the EU may try the same. At the very least, keeping a viable competitor in the cpu market may be seen as serving the EU's long term interests.

Not quite true I think. AMD has 100% of it's high-end processor fab in Germany I think. If they lost that fab due to an earthquake they'd be dead meat. If Intel lost a fab in Malaysia it would not be good, but they'd not be dead meat, they'd just have a sore elbow.

P.S. - Yes, AMD has now multiple fabs in Germany, but I think they're next to one another.

Who said Intel are innocent? If you've seen the evidence discovered by the EU's lawyers, please let us in on it. But to think the European Union would go to court in a case like this withouth hard evidence is a tad more absurd.

So you have to use windows media player, to play windows media? also there are alternatives to the products windows have. They may not be what you want or need but they are there. You have linux, you have open office. Oddly enough, the ones I mentioned are FREE.

Xavian does seem to have no idea what he is saying.Not only (in hardware terms) is there a wide range of support for wma files in portable players (Creative, Cowon, Philips, Microsoft, iRiver etc etc), but in terms of software on a computer for playing, there are many many many available options (Winamp, Foobar etc etc).So not only does wma work in different software players, it also works on different hardware, unlike Apple iTunes tracks. Although I am not sure how the new Zune marketplace tracks work.

As for office files, as mentioned, OpenOffice (AFAIK) works with MS Office files, and it's free, and available for Windows and Linux.

First off, Microsoft no longer creates its own monopoly, it no longer has too, all the programs bring written are written for the majority OS (aka: Windows) if you want to get pissed off at someone for creating a monopoly, well, go yell at anyone who uses Windows.

Secondly, I do belive OpenOffice can handle any Microsoft Office file. And WMA can be played on other programs with a few minutes of googling codec packs.

THERE ARE MANY ALTERNATIVES, you just to much of a moron to find them, and I hope when you do, that your to stupid to use them.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer